For a time, Tanzania enjoyed a reputation for mostly free elections and public debate. But after President John Magufuli was elected in 2015, he introduced measures to stifle the media and tilt the electoral playing field in favor of the longtime ruling party. The turn toward authoritarianism is not due to any one personality or stereotypical “mad dictator,” however (notwithstanding Magufuli’s pandemic denialism, which may have cost him his life). It is part of the legacy of the early postcolonial period and the revered founding president, Julius Nyerere, who set the foundations of one-party rule and wielded the rhetoric of economic nationalism.

Exploding in October 2020 and reverberating internationally, protests against police brutality under the hashtag #EndSARS exposed enduring patterns and emergent trends in Nigerian politics and society. This article examines various elements of the protests to advance hypotheses about the culture of social media, the weakening of old forms of solidarity, and the rise of a new generation of activists steeped in new rules and technologies of civic engagement. #EndSARS marks the possible ascent of an inorganic civil society with profound implications for Nigerian democracy.

Frederick the Great, king of Prussia, was an Enlightenment philosophe as well as an absolute monarch. His writings, available in a new translation, reveal a complex character and raise questions about government and autocracy in contemporary Europe.

In an October 2020 referendum, nearly 80 percent of Chileans voted to start a process to write a new constitution. A special assembly with equal representation of men and women will now attempt to replace the 1980 dictatorship-era constitution. Getting to this point was a major win for workers, students, leftists, feminists, Indigenous peoples, and the poor, all of whom were involved in leading 2019’s widespread protests over social and economic inequality. The demonstrations forced the conservative government to make the concession of holding the referendum. Chile now embarks on the fraught process of writing a new constitution that must satisfy diverse stakeholders while reforming political and economic systems that have preserved the legacy of the Pinochet dictatorship.

The November 2019 ouster of President Evo Morales, followed by the interim government’s harsh crackdown on his supporters, plunged Bolivia into a political crisis just as the COVID-19 pandemic arrived with devastating effect. The interim government’s haphazard response was marred by corruption scandals over procurement of medical supplies. After several delays, a general election was finally held in October 2019. Luis Arce, the presidential candidate of Morales’s Movement Toward Socialism, won decisively. But Morales’s subsequent return from exile signaled that the struggle over his legacy would continue.

In June 2019, Nayib Bukele, a former mayor affiliated with the former guerrilla movement FMLN, became president of El Salvador at the head of a new party allied with a splinter faction of the right-wing ARENA party. Capitalizing on the corruption scandals that tainted the two major parties, the youthful businessman rode to victory on an anti-sleaze platform. He has made Twitter his government’s main communications platform, using symbolic politics to achieve high public approval ratings. But the president spurns openness and transparency in government, is hostile to the media, and openly defies the legislature and the judiciary, putting democracy at risk.

Southeast Asia was one of the first regions hit by the spread of COVID-19. The region’s public health response varied, with some states like Vietnam proving models for the world, while others, like Indonesia and the Philippines, faltered badly. However, they have generally taken a common approach in one area: nearly all have used the pandemic to crack down on political freedoms and civil liberties.

The strategies Kabila adopted to avoid stepping down at the end of his term in December 2016 inadvertently consolidated this new democratic wave.

[T]he more distant the experience of military rule, the greater has been society's reconciliation to the reality of democracy as the only game in town.

Sri Lanka's ethnoreligious divisions are bound to continue as long as the likes of Rajapaksa dominate the island's political scene.

What keeps European states committed to the EU project has not changed: it is economically much better to be inside the bloc than outside.

European democracy has always been playing catch-up with popular aspirations for democratic representation.

Nations that endured communist dictatorships must come to terms with the traumas of the past before durable democracies can take hold—a lesson the author learned firsthand in Romania.

An ambitious attempt to trace the uneven progress toward liberal democracy over several centuries of European history may have drawn the wrong conclusions for dealing with today's illiberals.

The heterogeneity and decentralized character of the protest movement is proving to be its greatest strength and weakness.

[T]he financial crisis can be best understood as the final catastrophic stage of a process of dismantling the protective institutions that made Western European capitalism politically sustainable …

Politicians proved unwilling to do the hard work of challenging vested interests and convincing electorates of the need for more profound reforms in the aftermath of the crisis.

Policies chosen by Putin, not innate forces of history, culture, or tradition, pushed Russia in a more autocratic direction …

The revolution … ended the hopelessness, apathy, and indifference that had come to characterize the post-Soviet period.

From local to national politics, the state, the party, and the personal interests of elites have merged into one machine.